Friday, August 8:Guggenheim Bullies Journalist: Molly Crabapple reports for Vice on inhumane immigrant labor conditions on Saadiyat island in the UAE, where a new arm of the Guggenheim (and Louvre, and NYU) is being built. The Guggenheim holds its cards close and skirts responsibility when... View full entry »

In a commission for the iconic Givskud Zoo in Denmark, BIG's current proposal "Zootopia" includes an open, cage-free zoo landscape for the animals to roam in that is divided into three zones titled "Asia", "Africa", and "America". Human visitors can then observe and ogle at the animals in... View full entry »

Bjarke Ingels’s ‘zootopia’ reverses the role of captor and captive to let animals roam free, while humans are hidden from view. But will it become a feral version of the Hunger Games?
— theguardian.com

A life-size maze like the one BIG installed in partnership with the National Building Museum will attract plenty of attention, regardless if people know who BIG is or not. Constructed in the museum's iconic Great Hall, the maze was set up as an interactive sneakpeek for BIG's exhibition scheduled to open at the museum in January 2015.
— bustler.net

As a follow-up to our previous mention of the maze, here's a little more detail behind it:Check out a time-lapse video of the maze's construction below. View full entry »

The museum teamed up with international architecture firm BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group to construct a maze right in the Great Hall. [...]

The museum’s “ubergoal is that people walk out of here looking at their built world differently,” Frankel says. “We think this is sort of on the microlevel of that — forcing people to look up [as they navigate the maze] will make them look at our building differently.”
— washingtonpost.com

From yesterday's announcement of the Rebuild By Design winners by the U.S. Department of HUD, we've got more details behind "The BIG U" by the BIG Team, who had one of the six winning propoals. The BIG-led consortium was awarded $335 million to implement their proposal for New York's Lower Manhattan, with the goal to increase the neighborhood's resiliency to future storm disasters. And with a name like "The BIG U", one can only be curious to find out more.
— bustler.net

It's all in the details with BIG + KILO's newly launched "BIG Cities" tableware collection. The longtime Danish collaborators worked with major porcelain manufacturer Rosenthal to craft the table set for the company's TAC collection. The collection was first developed in the 1960s and includes... View full entry »

BIG, in collaboration with HKS Architects and Michael Diggiss Architects, revealed their design for the Honeycomb residential building in the beach and golf resort community of Albany in The Bahamas. Commissioned by Tavistock Group and New Valley LLC, the 175,000 ft² (approx. 16,000 m²)... View full entry »

This ice castle—or, ice bank fortress—is perhaps the most spectacular entrant in the 30th annual International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival in the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin. A sign hanging outside the sculpture suggests it’s intended to look like a branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the nation’s biggest bank.
— qz.com

As we mentioned earlier today, BIG was revealed as one of three finalists — along with OMA and Buro-OS — for the new Axel Springer Media Campus in Berlin. The new Axel Springer headquarters will be located at one of the last remaining plots of the historic former site of the Berlin Wall. All winning entries will be publicly displayed at the German Architecture Centre (DAZ) in Berlin from Dec. 17 - Dec. 22.
— bustler.net

In the international competition for the new Berlin Media Campus of German publishing house Axel Springer, the jury managed to agree upon their three favorite entries — but not quite yet in which order. Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), OMA (Rem Koolhaas) and Buro Ole Scheeren were selected as winners from a group of five finalists (including SANAA and Kuehn Malvezzi) that were invited to present their proposals to the jury on December 12. Eighteen submissions had been received altogether.
— bustler.net

The competition brief had deliberately not placed tight restrictions on the submitted designs — something that the three winners will now have to finalize in their proposals before the jury selects the overall winner. BIG: OMA: Buro Ole Scheeren: All images courtesy of Axel Springer. Who do... View full entry »

BIG's latest museum design, the Blåvand Bunker Museum, will be built in the historic dune landscape of Varde in Denmark after the museum received the necessary funding from the A.P. Møller and Chastine Mc-Kinney Møller Foundation.

The museum will transform a former German WWII bunker into a four-volume museum complex — all while fully integrated into one of the dunes.
— bustler.net

Beth Rosenthal penned an Op-Ed - Millennials and Opportunity: Embracing Intentional vs Spontaneous Change in the Workforce. In the piece she puts a challenge/question to her contemporaries; "What if rather than changing jobs or companies, you tried to change the system or culture... View full entry »